Feist
(Cherrytree / Interscope)
Anyone who has seen Leslie Feist join in with Broken Social Scene knows that she's not the staid chanteuse that her solo work might suggest. She can play a mean electric guitar, and her intensity can hold its own amidst the Scene's army of males (or, early in her career, against Peaches' ravings).
Metals is not her rock move, but it is certainly more intense and at times percussive than either 2004's Let It Die or 2007's The Reminder (or 1999's lesser known Monarch). It has its share of gentle, plainspoken ballads: "Cicadas And Gulls" lilts and sways to little more than an acoustic guitar and a double-tracked vocal; the darker "Caught A Long Wind" pulses with autumnal strings and moody piano chords (from longtime collaborator Chilly Gonzales, who is also one of the album's several co-producers). But Metals has a surprising fascination with drums pumped to the forefront of the mix, sometimes disruptively.
It opens with the heavy clip-clop beat of "The Bad In Each Other," a song that also sets the thematic tone for an album of conflicted love songs: "A good man, a good woman can bring out the worst in each other," Feist sings. "A Commotion" ends with a choir of voices bouncing against one another, some of them shouting; it recalls Bjork or Kate Bush circa The Dreaming. "The Circle Married The Line" and "Bittersweet Melodies" contain glimpses of the radio-friendly Feist of "Mushaboom" or "1-2-3-4," but while they're comfortable and familiar - and among the record's best songs - their accessible pleasures aren't the priority here. Metals is more interested in dualities: the good and the bad, the loud and the soft, the bitter and the sweet. The last song, a sparse electric guitar ballad, identifies another dualism: it's called "Get It Wrong, Get It Right," and like most of the rest of this unsettled album, it gets it right.
DOWNLOAD: "Bittersweet Melodies," "The Bad In Each Other" STEVE KLINGE
